Pocho by Jose Antonio Villarreal Essay -- Mexican Culture Catholicism

Pocho by Jose Antonio VillarrealThe 1959 novel, Pocho, by Jos Antonio Villarreal is an insightful heathen exposition told generally from the vantage point of Richard Rubio, the coming-of-age son of immigrant Mexican parents who flushtually settle in Santa Clara, California, after many seasons of migrant farm work. Although fiction, the story the likely mirrors some of the experiences of the fountain who was born to migrant laborers in Los Angeles in 1924 and was himself a pocho - a child of the depression era Mexican-American revolution. (I am a Pocho, he said, and we speak like this because here in California we make Castilian words out of English words. p 165)Such a journey was a difficult ace (...for the transition from the culture of the old world to that of the new world should never have been attempted in one generation. p 135), and Villarreal nicely employs a cross cultural bildungsroman to explore a diversity of related themes.Among the most prominent are strains of ra cism/classism, belonging and dislocation, death and meaning and self-identity, and sexual awakening. In a deoxidise 187 pages the author competently weaves social commentary (via the seemingly innocent adolescent perspective) into a moving narrative that only occasionally veers toward the pedantic.Richards father, Juan Rubio, is proud to be a Mexican and resents the Spanish people, whom he identifies as oppressors (although Juan is clearly of Spanish descent since he had fair skin and blue-gray eyes - p 1). He explains to his son, who exclaims in resolution to his fathers prejudice, But all your friends are Spanish (p 99)That is all there is here, said Juan Rubio, but these people are different - they are also from the lower class... ...s parents. Second, one should not, on penalty of going to Hell, discuss religion with the priests. And, last, one should not ask questions on history of the teachers, or one will be unploughed in after school, he said. I do not find it in me to u nderstand why it is this way. (p 85, 86)Author Jos Antonio Villarreal has a dry sense of body fluid and, as mentioned above, does a marvelous job weaving bits of wry commentary throughout the novel. Another fun quote is when Richards sister, Luz, demonstrates her own prejudice for the newly arrived, and darker skinned, Mexicans Well, they aint got nuthin and they dont even talk good English. (p 148) Now, 50 years after the novel was first written, the story is still relevant. Its an intriguing narrative and helpful in capturing the double intellect that many Mexican-Americans lived with as a matter of course.